Glossary
Ale
Beer fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, typically warm, which produces the esters and phenols that give ales more yeast-derived fruit and spice than lagers.
The modern distinction is about fermentation, not about colour, strength or bitterness. A pale, delicate Kölsch is an ale; a black, roasty Schwarzbier is a lager.
Historically the word meant something quite different: in medieval England ale was unhopped and beer was hopped, and the two were separately taxed and separately regarded. That distinction had collapsed by the eighteenth century.
Commonly misunderstood
"Ale" is often used to mean dark, strong or traditional beer. It names a fermentation family, and includes some of the palest and lightest beer made.
What this word used to mean
Historically
In England before roughly 1600, ale meant specifically *unhopped* fermented malt drink, and beer meant the hopped kind. They were different products, regarded differently, made by different people and taxed differently — hopped beer arrived from the continent and was treated as a foreign import for generations.
Today
A beer fermented with top-fermenting yeast, as opposed to a lager fermented with bottom-fermenting yeast. The distinction is now about yeast and temperature and has nothing to do with hops, which are in essentially everything.
When it changed. The two words converged as hopping became universal in England through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The modern ale/lager sense is later still and follows the nineteenth-century understanding of yeast.
A reader who applies the modern sense to an English source before about 1600 will misread it completely: "ale" and "beer" there are two products in competition, not two words for one thing.
Related
- Lager — The other fermentation family.
- Top fermentation — The process it names.
More vocabulary
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.